


Masaru

by Somniarx (Kaida13th)



Series: Tokyo Ghoul OC Derps [1]
Category: Original Work, Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-21
Updated: 2016-08-21
Packaged: 2018-08-10 02:30:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7826731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaida13th/pseuds/Somniarx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Masaru and Shii-chan's backstory, before and during the Tokyo Ghoul timeline. Short and rough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: She

**Author's Note:**

> Hi I'm Somni and this is my first post here and I only write about my OCs. I'm posting because I was told I should post...even though I don't think anyone would want to read about my OCs lmaO. BuT here it is mhm.  
> Everything I post is...not proofread by anyone but me s-so some of it isn't even translated fully into English ssorry. But it should make sense at least. I'm better about translation in later works but these first couple chapters are rough ssorry...!! For now, please excuse the random bits of Spanish, French, Chinese, and Japanese that may appear...Also I don't know how to spell. I have no excuses.
> 
> Things in [ ] are translations and author's notes!

Okaa-san came home one evening without otou-san. The small creature she brought with her instead was to take his place in our home.  
“You’re going to be an older brother, Masaru,” okaa-san announced to me that night, cradling a tiny child in one hand and her usual suitcase in the other. I didn’t care about that. I just wondered where otou-san was, and whose blood okaa-san was covered in.  
I had left both parents that morning as I set out for school, just like any other day. I grabbed my randoseru with a muffled “Ittekimaa~su,” said through the last of my breakfast. I turned back to wave from the fence as always. I met up with my friend halfway as always. And I gestured a small wave to my parents from my seat in the classroom as they left the neighboring CCG building for lunch as always. But that was the last time I saw otou-san.  
“Who are you gonna fight today?” I had asked him over breakfast that morning.  
“Hmm hmm, today there’s a ghoul called Oosansouo* that we’re pretty sure we’ve pinned down, xiao Masaru,” otou-san answered me from across the table.  
*["giant salamander," written with the kanji “big,” “mountain,” “mountain ash,” and “fish;” lit. Giant Pepper Fish]

“There were two of them,” okaa-san explained that late evening, “We thought…Oosansouo was just a B-rank ghoul so…the two of us should have been able to but…the other one…S-rank? Maybe SS...” her voice trailed off, and she clutched the infant more tightly. She let out a small sigh, then laid the infant down on the couch beside her and mumbled that she had to go back to fill out some paperwork.  
I’m not sure just what she expected an eight-year-old to do with a baby, but she left without any sort of instructions aside from, “All we heard was ‘Shii—’ so…we’ll call her that.”  
I definitely didn’t understand at the time that the infant okaa-san had brought home was the child of the two ghouls my parents killed that night. And I still don’t understand why okaa-san decided to spare her, much less bring her home. I tried for a long time to just not think about it.  
She was a good child. Didn’t cry much. Okaa-san waited until she began chewing on us to feed her. I didn’t know where she got the meat; I still don’t know for sure. But somehow, once a week for a while and then twice a month, she came home with a rather hefty packet of “ghoul food.” The packets were rather large to my young eyes but, as ghouls usually average about one corpse a month, they were only just enough to keep the child from instinctively trying to eat us.  
She would have been raised completely as a human, but she was quickly too old, too curious, for a cop-out answer to why she wasn’t able to eat meals with us. When she was around three, she stopped accepting such excuses as, “because you’re too young” or “because you don’t like okaa-san’s cooking anyway, right?” Around this time okaa-san started bringing her to work instead of leaving her with child sitters, who always were a bit too prying when told this child wasn’t allowed to eat during the day.  
“An experiment,” okaa-san proposed to her branch of the CCG. “We know how humans raised by ghouls end up, but what about ghouls raised by humans? Perhaps we can domesticate them…make them work for us."  
Okaa-san wasn’t so cold a person as to simply turn a child into a science fair project. But we didn’t have a lot of options. Luckily, somehow someone along the line was interested enough to try their hand at this risky game.  
Under almost constant supervision by humans who wore a mask of kindness to hide their eagerness to jump at any excuse to kill her, Shii-chan was raised. And I, admiring my parents’ work and wanting to take part in looking after Shii-chan, began the path to become an investigator as well.  
When Shii-chan was six, and I thirteen, my mother died.  
I say “died” in the instance of both parents, though in both instances they were indeed killed for picking fights with monsters.  
The CCG “stopped” Shii-chan’s experiment. The few advocates for it disappeared before okaa-san’s body could go cold, and I learned how adults could be cruel and petty. They left me, us, with a few meat packets and an, “If she stays out of trouble we won’t hunt her down.” In all likelihood, there was probably some expectation of me to kill her off once she inevitably ran out of food and turned on me. They even supplied me with a small quinque steel knife. And maybe this was the last test - could one of their students hold his own against a domestic ghoul so early in his training? Or maybe it was an excuse to get rid of her once they had the excuse of her killing a human (not that anyone has ever really needed a reason to kill a monster).  
But she was already my little sister, and the only family I had left.

There was a rumor about the existence of a certain coffee shop that helped ghouls who couldn’t get food on their own.  
All anyone could tell me is that it was maybe probably somewhere in the 20th ward and they might just be serving up customers to their ghoul patrons. It was a spider’s thread, but shortly after I’d turned fourteen I had a seven-year-old ghoul with an insatiable appetite who hadn’t eaten in a couple weeks -  even in spite of our careful rationing of meals and pushing her to the very limits of what little self-control a child has. A hungry ghoul child is truly terrifying to a middle-schooler with only basic knife skills and the strength of a mere pre-pubescent human, but at least she was not yet able to bring out kagune. I probably owe my life to the fact that she was so malnutritioned. Needing a solution - urgently - I took advantage of the impulsive decisions only capable of being thought rational by a fourteen-year-old, and began walking around town with Shii-chan in search of other ghouls.  
She could smell them. Sort of. That was useful. Occasionally. It wasn’t so much that she knew what ghouls smelled like, but more so that some people didn’t smell like other humans, didn’t smell appetizing, so I’m sure she couldn’t pick up on each ghoul we passed. And sometimes it was just an unappetizing human.  
After a couple days of aimless wandering we found only one ghoul, who didn’t know anything about such a place, and only refrained from eating me because she didn’t wish to “steal a meal from such a cute little girl.” Quite contrary, it would have been nice if she had shared some food with us. After this encounter, I then thought it might be wiser to actually go in to coffee shops. At least I was less likely to be eaten in such a public place. Probably.  
Another few weeks passed with no luck, and in our desperation to control Shii-chan’s hunger we tried having her eat different human foods every night, to see if there was something that she could at least stand to fill her stomach with. We did eventually discover coffee, which, bitter as it is, isn’t exactly something a seven-year-old would enjoy. But at least she didn’t hate it, and it didn’t make her sick. It’s probably the only thing that allowed us to keep going for so long.  
That day, we’d heard the coffee shop on our to-visit list had exceptionally delicious coffee, so we sat down and ordered. When Shii-chan told me our waitress was a ghoul, I froze for a bit. I hadn’t thought this through. It’s not like it’s something I could just ask her about, not while she’s at work, trying so hard to fit in to her human environment. So we sat there enjoying our drinks for a while, until Shii-chan got up and walked over to the counter. Under the guise of ogling the pastries (which smelled terrible to her, I’m sure), she approached the other worker near the register. He smiled at her, and as she returned he nonchalantly whispered to his coworker.  
“Is he…?” I asked Shii-chan. She nodded, hesitantly. Our waitress returned shortly after, pausing before she spoke. She looked confused, at Shii-chan, disgusted, at me, and then concerned, back to Shii-chan. She asked (Shii-chan), “Is there…anything else you need?"  
Shii-chan looked to me. I know, I know, it’s supposed to be me taking charge and taking care of you but honestly I was scared. The waitress didn’t look any older than a high schooler, maybe a college student, but she was somehow quite intimidating. Probably had something to do with how she could kill me at any moment. Probably.  
“Ano, ne, onee-san,” Shii-chan started, snapping me out of my spiral of “what if she eats me."  
“M-may I ask you something?” I inquired, sheepishly.  
“What?” she spat, shattering my fragile confidence.  
“C-can I speak with the manager?” Not what I intended to say at all but,  
She squinted, shrugged, and walked off with a, “Sure."  
An old man came out to meet us. He, unlike our waitress, seemed kind and gentle. But Shii-chan’s nose wrinkled the way it does when she smells something unappetizing, so I thought he was probably also a ghoul. He took one look at us and  suggested we speak elsewhere, so we were brought to a back room.  
Walking, now literally surrounded by ghouls - Shii-chan, the waitress, and the manager - half of me had already accepted my fate. The world would not miss one orphan middle schooler, and Shii-chan would be taken care of. Probably. The other half thought the looks on their faces would be kind of amusing if they attacked me, and Shii-chan, who could barely pass as a five-year-old, stood at my defense.  
We were led to a small living-room-esque area. Shii-chan and I sat down on a couch and the other two sat down across from us. Prompted for our story with the leading accusation from the waitress, “What are you doing with her?” I narrated how we came to be in our current situation (conveniently leaving out the parts about my parents being ghoul investigators, and myself on the same track).  
“…That’s why,” I finished, “it doesn’t really matter what happens to me, but Shii-chan…she’s never killed anyone. She’s never even been around other ghouls. She…she just needs to eat."  
The old man was very understanding. I was prepared to sacrifice so much just so Shii-chan could eat, but all he asked in return was that we occasionally bring a few bags of a coffee bean only sold near where we lived. Without question, I accepted, and this was the beginning of our relationship with Anteiku.


	2. Wawayu

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shii-chan gets stabby. Touka-chan is there.

Shii-chan was only nine, or perhaps, already nine by the time she was able to bring out her kagune. She still only just barely looked like a first-grader at this age. How had her malnourished body decided it was so much more important to grow such a dangerous thing than to grow itself in general? No, perhaps it’s because she was always starving. Yes, then it would make sense to develop a hunting organ to better procure food. Those were my thoughts as I was hunched up against one of the small walls in our tiny apartment, getting blood all over the tatami mats. Ah, that’s going to be expensive to replace. Shii-chan’s tiny frame stood over me, her cute grey-brown eyes now red, framed in black.

We were sparring. I had started sparring classes at the investigator academy upon entering high school*, and figured it would be beneficial for Shii-chan to know how to protect herself. Clearing as much space as we could in our small living room, we fought every now and then, a couple times a week for the past few months. Bare-handed, she always won. Moreso because I could never catch her than that she dealt more damage, though that was a fact as well. Those tiny hands packed more of a punch than I could ever hope to manage as an adolescent. Only investigators were allowed to be issued actual quinque, so I'd have to wait until I graduated for that, but if I used the small quinque knife I was given long ago I could win occasionally. [* high school begins in 10th grade, age 15~16]

“Onii-chan?” she tilted her head. It’s probably my fault. I took for granted the fact that she had people to teach her about being a ghoul now, I should have continued teaching her what it means to be human. I’ve stabbed her with my knife more than a couple of times, I won’t deny it. She probably never even stopped to think that such a trivial wound for her could quickly become fatal for me.

I let out a small chuckle that was more air than laugh and managed, “Nice shot,” before losing consciousness.

 

Fading in and out for a while, I realized I was being carried the next time I came to. Even for a tiny girl ghoul like Shii-chan, sprinting across town with a sixteen-year-old boy on her back was probably a small feat. The next time I opened my eyes it was dark, there was yelling, and I smelled the familiar scent of coffee. Maybe it’s a good thing I was so negligent in teaching her about humans things - I may have ended up at a hospital rather than Anteiku.

“I killed onii-chan!” Shii-chan sobbed to Touka-san, the new waitress who happened to be in that night. Well, she was technically there every night, since she lived above the shop.

“Mm not dead,” I grunted from Shii-chan’s small back.

“Shitty human, what do you expect to happen trying to raise a ghoul!” Touka-san had been very against our situation from the start. She had a point  - if I were a ghoul a wound like this from a child would be nothing. Acquiring food for her would be nothing.

“Get him upstairs,” I heard Touka-san’s fading voice once more as I drifted off again. Just how much blood had I lost? Probably not that much. Shii-chan’s jab caught me off guard but I mostly dodged it. Probably. I’d later learn that she had recently been able to bring out her kagune, and wanted to surprise me with how well she could use it. She had been practicing on her own while I was at school. Surprise me she certainly did.  
 

I woke up the next morning in one of Anteiku’s spare rooms, already bandaged. Shii-chan was asleep at my bedside.

“You’re too small to be Oosansouo so…Wawayu?*” I ran my fingers through her indigo hair and chuckled quietly.

“Wawa…?” she mumbled tilting her head up to peer over her crossed arms.

“Your 'shining tail' looks like a salamander tail."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Oosansouo is Japanese for "giant salamander.” It is written with the kanji “big,” “mountain,” “mountain ash,” and “fish;” literally Giant Pepper Fish. It was the ghoul code name the CCG had given Shii-chan's father. The Chinese name for it is Wawayu, translating to infant fish (because their cries sound like human babies), which Masaru deems more appropriate for tiny Shii-chan.


	3. Roots

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shii-chan gets hangry.  
> Sometimes you gotta stab your lil sister.  
> Touka-chan is there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Masaru is like 18 here so we're officially into the timeline of Tokyo Ghoul LOL. He's a Real Investigator(tm) now with a shiny quinque and everything. More on that later. For now, it's stabby time.

It may sound boastful, but I am a little proud to say that there was only one other occasion we had to rush to Anteiku for medical assistance. I knew it had been a while since she last ate, I knew. But she kept insisting she was fine, she was fine. She wasn’t really acting any different from usual. I thought I’d be able to tell when she was getting close to her limit. Touka-san was always telling me to monitor her closely because hunger for a ghoul is the worst. So it should be obvious, right? But Shii-chan was normal, all was as usual. She was just drinking more coffee. Of course she was, she wasn’t eating. I didn’t think much of that alone.

But there was a peculiar pain floating, slowly intensifying above my left collar bone, and the Shii-chan who was obviously too starved to bring out her kagune stood a couple meters from me, tail shining that uncanny peppered yellow. She gulped. I gulped. Probably for a different reason.

“Onii-chan, oishii,” she breathed, smile revealing my flesh caught between her teeth.

'Well. This is it. One of us is going to die here. And it’s probably going to be me,' I thought, instinctively reaching for the suitcase that wasn’t by my side. Why would I need it close by at home? There aren’t any ghouls here.

“Shitty human, don’t get cocky thinking you’re safe because you see her as your cute little sister,” Touka-san’s words echoed in my head as I frantically crawled backwards, away from my attacker. Part of me hadn’t caught up yet, thinking, 'Shii-chan? Cute xiao ShiShii? There’s no way she could hurt you,’ meanwhile my body, knowing full well that was incredibly wrong, moved backwards on its own until I hit a wall.

“S-Shii-chan,” I tried to call out to her.

“Mm…mhm. Just a little bit okay?” she was probably talking to herself.

“Shii-chan, wait a m—“ I didn’t even have time to finish before I was pinned down and she took another chunk of my shoulder.

“Oishii, oishii,” she breathed, happily, between bites.

My futile attempts at pushing her off didn’t even result in another centimeter of freedom. She was probably the strongest eleven-year-old ever. By human standards at least. Pushing against her small shoulders gained me nothing. Her tail tangled around my legs, preventing movement. I was going to die.

Well, that’s fine, I thought. She fights pretty well now and she has others to rely on now, too. If I have to be killed by a ghoul I’m glad it’s Shii-chan, I thought.

Touka-san always joked about taking her from me, so I guess she’ll finally be able to, haha. I’ll just have to let her know about, or, well, I guess she’ll just have to find out about how Shii-chan starts speaking half-Chinese sometimes. Ah, and that she gets grumpy if she’s in the sun too long. And that she’s afraid of dogs, even though she says she’s not. She already knows about the pants thing, so I guess that’s fine. Though I think there are some words she only knows in Chinese. What if no one understands her? Ah, what if they make her do things she’s not used to…? What if she...misses me? Oh, what if she blames herself for this? Can Touka-san convince her she’s not a monster for killing her older brother? She's only eleven. Mm, that’s right, I can’t die yet. I still have to…still have to protect Shii-chan.

“Shii-chan…” I whispered, remembering the one soft spot on ghouls, "sorry, I can’t let you eat me yet,” I apologized, poking her eyes out with my fingers. Oh God, I just poked out my little sister’s eyes with my fingers.

I managed to stand while she recoiled, screaming, clutching her face. I lunged for my suitcase on the shelf across the small room. We learned before that these stupidly expensive tatami mats are pretty good at absorbing blood, so at this moment I was glad to have splurged and replaced them after that time. If I had slipped I wouldn’t have made it. If I'd had any less traction than their rough surfaces, I wouldn't have made it.

Flipping the latch, I activated the quinque and Shii-chan dove straight on to the red-orange kagune that sprang out, gutting through her core.

“Itai, itai,” she yelled, cried, spewing small amounts of blood mixed with chunks of flesh about the room.

“Shii-chan!” I said again, trying to snap her out of whatever hunger-induced craze she was trapped in.

She clutched at the bigaku barreling through her stomach, scratched at it for a moment in attempt to get free. But the crab-claw shaped end, closed to pierce, was now open again behind her. She was going nowhere. Suddenly she froze. Her black eyes, having already regenerated, slowly drifted upward from her wound, to the tail, to the suitcase, to me. She breathed a quiet, “Onii-chan,” before passing out.

I am going to have to replace every single one of these damn mats.

Recoiling my quinque, I brought Shii-chan closer to me, and she slid off into my arms. Struggling to hold off on freaking out about the condition she was in, I was in, I knew we had to get help. I could probably patch her up a bit and still have enough blood in me to make it, I thought. And so I allowed myself eight minutes to bandage her, and two minutes for my own wounds. And then it was my turn to dash across the city at night with her on my back.  

It was almost a good hour before we made it to our destination. I wasn’t as fast as Shii-chan, especially not while carrying Shii-chan. Every step up those familiar stairs felt heavier and heavier, while my head felt lighter and lighter, and the world spun faster and faster. I opened the door and was met with a startled, “Irassha—iiii.”

“Heyyy,” I sighed. We probably looked like we just got out of a zombie movie. Well, I was kind of still in a zombie movie.

“Ha, did Shii-chan impale you again, shitty human?” Touka-san jested.

"Give me a break, that was one time," I laughed, attempting and failing to take another step forward. That effort somehow turned into me falling to my knees. This probably revealed Shii-chan, as Touka-san’s expression hardened.

“Get the manager,” she said to her co-worker, and then walked over to take Shii-chan from me.

'Ah, I wonder if I’ll get her back,’ was my last thought for the night.

I woke up in one of Anteiku’s spare rooms with a sense of deja vu. Shii-chan slept at my bedside, head on her crossed arms, just like last time.

“Wawayu,” I smiled, reaching out to touch her, but stopped as Touka-san entered the room.

“Hm? So you are alive, shitty human,” she frowned. I nodded. She leaned against the bed on the other side of Shii-chan, by my knees. “We managed to bandage her up properly and feed her, but she refused to leave your side and lie down."

“Ah…Thanks,” was all I could think to say. Touka-san’s gaze fell downward towards her feet, but her focus was elsewhere.

“I don’t get it,” she sighed eventually. “How can you hunt us for no reason and at the same time risk your life playing house with us? Some sort of self-pitying retribution act?"

I was silent. I didn’t really know either. All I did know is that ghouls hunting humans is a problem. I know they have to eat. I know it. But some part of me still wishes they didn’t exist. And yet at the same time, I recognize that it’s wrong to hunt ghouls, too. What choice do they have but to eat? What choice do they have when we have rejected them from society? What choice do they have when their hunger causes them to lose self-control to the point they would attack people they love? Humans choose to hunt them. Because we are angry that they exist. But they never had a choice to begin with - eating humans or not, existing or not.

A quiet “nn” interrupted our one-sided conversation, directing our attention to the small girl who definitely looked more like she’d be related to Touka-san than to me.

“Onii-chan?” she mumbled, squinting in the early sunlight from the window she faced as she sat up.

“Mm,” I nodded, smiling.

Her eyes widened, watered, and I only slightly flinched when she lunged toward me crying, much more audibly, “Onii-chan! Onii-chan!"

“Hai, hai,” I returned her embrace.

“Gomen ne, onii-chan,” she sobbed, letting go, “I killed you again, you were died, I ate you, I didn’t mean it—"

“Shii-chan, it’s okay, it’s fine,” I tried to convince her.

“It’s nawt,” still sobbing, “I didn’t, I just didn’t want to eat anymore, I’m, but I ate you anyway, onii-chan—"

“No, I…I should have paid more attention, Shii-chan."

Touka-san huffed.

“Onii-cahn,” Shii-chan sniffed, then straightened out a bit, “Ne, onii-chan, you don’t have to keep me anymore, okay?"

She said it so blatantly, matter-of-factly, it took me a while to process that she was serious.

“What?” I breathed, attempting to buy more time to generate a response.

“Mhm, because, because, I’ll probably end up killing you…eating you…one day, onii-chan…"

“Shii-chan,” I said softly, shaking my head. The look on her face was so determined it slowed down my thought process even more. How long had she been working up the courage to say such a ridiculous thing? How long had she even been thinking about such a ridiculous thing?

My grip on her elbows had become tight. I relaxed it and gently slid my hands down to hold her tiny fingers. She didn’t break my gaze.

“Shishii xiao meimei,” I finally started, “You are my precious little sister. How could I ever leave you behind?"

“Dateh, watashi no sei kara[because of me]—"

“Chigau yo. Zenzen sonna koto nai yo [that's not it at all],” I tried to persuade, “Shishii, if you were raised by a proper parent…a proper ghoul, none of this would happen to you. It’s because you’re under the care of someone incompetent, someone who can’t even see that you’re past your limits, starving, that things like this happen. It’s because you were raised as a human with a diet condition, yet never told how fragile humans are that things like this happen. None of it is your fault, Shii-chan. Rather, it’s me being selfish for wanting to stay with you, even though it’s probably no good for either of us. Even so, Shii-chan…even in spite of that, will you continue to let me stay by your side?"

Ah, there it is. I was finally able to say what I’d been thinking, too. Maa naa, of course she would want to go be with a ghoul, with someone whom she can more easily relate to. Someone who knows her needs.

But Shii-chan’s look of determination had faded into tears again.

"Baka-nii-chan! Don't act like you're not the one in danger here! Of course I want to stay with you! But what if I hurt you?! More than this time? More than last time?"

"Shii-chan..." Just what kind of things was this eleven-year-old worrying about? I tried to think of something insightful to say, but only came up with a phrase otou-san used to tell me, "Hurting others is what it means to be alive. If you never do any harm, you're just like a leaf in the wind - being blown places you don't want to go. But if you pierce the ground to lay your roots, sap some of its life to grow for yourself and stand strong, you can enjoy the gentle breezes instead of worrying where they will take you."

And that’s the extent of ancient Chinese wisdom this half-breed could manage. But it seemed to be enough for Shii-chan.


End file.
